Mark Warner on offense in Virginia Senate debate

Sen. Mark Warner leads by double digits in every public poll of the Virginia Senate race, but the Democrat didn’t debate Saturday with the confidence of someone cruising to reelection.

Virginia voters weren’t actually watching his first debate with Republican Ed Gillespie. Fewer than 800 people were tuned into PBS’s livestream, and the debate, which was actually held across the border in West Virginia, won’t be aired in full on any of the television affiliates that cover the Old Dominion. That’s good news for a senator who led by 25 points in a Roanoke College poll published this week.

Text Size

-

+

reset

The incumbent came out swinging early and often in a 90-minute debate at the Greenbrier Resort. When Republican Ed Gillespie attacked him for voting 97 percent of the time with President Barack Obama, Warner fired back with criticism of his work in George W. Bush’s White House and as a lobbyist for Enron.

Warner might even have overreached by claiming, without direct evidence, that Gillespie supports so-called Personhood legislation.

“He’s spent his entire career as a D.C. lobbyist and a partisan operative,” Warner said. “He even went on TV and called himself a ‘partisan warrior.’ His words; not mine. … The last thing Washington needs is another partisan warrior.”

The first — and possibly only — debate of the contest gave Gillespie the chance to show that this race should be higher on the list of potential GOP pick-up opportunities. The former chairman of the Republican National Committee fiercely challenged Warner’s claims to independence, calling him a “blank check” for Obama.

“His press releases are very bipartisan, but his floor votes are very partisan,” said Gillespie. “Governor Warner wouldn’t recognize Senator Warner today.”

Moderator Judy Woodruff, the PBS anchor, flushed out the candidates on a range of issues where they differ, from the Export-Import bank to EPA regulations and gay marriage. It was much more civil than the gubernatorial debate the Virginia Bar Association sponsored last summer, and both candidates came across at their best.

Here are the 10 key flashpoints from the showdown in White Sulphur Springs:

Gillespie advocated for over-the-counter sale of contraception:

Social issues did not come up until the final question. Speaking about the Hobby Lobby case involving employer-sponsored contraception, Gillespie said he thinks the issue can be skirted if women are just allowed to buy birth-control medication on their own without a prescription — a position that Colorado GOP Senate candidate Cory Gardner also staked out recently.

Gillespie does not have a long paper trail on abortion issues, and he pushed back when Warner said he would overturn Roe vs. Wade or push a Personhood amendment, which would say life begins at conception.

“Please provide the documentation for my support of any of those things,” Gillespie said.

Warner countered: “If you are in the Senate, would you vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade? Did you not also support a personhood amendment?”

“No,” Gillespie replied. “When did I support a Personhood amendment?”

“We’ll get you the documentation,” Warner said.

“There’s not going to be a vote to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Gillespie said. “That’s a Supreme Court decision. I’m running for the United States Senate.”

“The folks who endorsed him in the right to life movement I think will be very surprised to hear that,” Warner said.

Gillespie cut him off. “I’m going to go through and look at the folks who endorsed you and we’ll find out what positions they have.”

The Warner campaign’s evidence that Gillespie supports Personhood is thin. They point to the platform passed by the Republican National Committee in 2004, when Gillespie was party chairman. “Gillespie chose the platform director and said the platform reflects the ‘beliefs of our party,’” Warner’s campaign emailed after.

Warner denied that he’s a rubber stamp for Obama:

The senator said that his Republican predecessor, John Warner, would not have endorsed him if he always voted with the president.

Warner stressed that he differs with the president on the Keystone pipeline and other issues. “I think the president should have acted sooner and tougher with sanctions on Russia,” Warner said.

Gillespie ducked a question from Woodruff about his tenure as a senior counselor in the Bush White House, and Warner pounced.

“What I didn’t hear from my opponent was an acknowledgement that he was a cheerleader for the Bush-Cheney economic agenda,” he said, noting that debt increased by 86 percent during the previous administration.

“My opponent criticizes the president,” Warner said later, “but he was part of the Bush-Cheney administration and was an advocate for the movement into Iraq.”

Gillespie defended his work as a lobbyist:

When the senator got a chance to ask Gillespie a question, he asked whether his lobbying firm was right to keep the $700,000 it collected from Enron.

“You were the lead lobbyist for Enron, who committed the greatest corporate fraud in American history,” said Warner.

Gillespie said he did not know Enron was cooking the books.

“It was a year-long contract, but it was only 10 months because two days after Ken Lay pleaded the Fifth, we said, ‘This is not the company we thought it was … and we left them,’” Gillespie said.